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Reading Robert Caro to learn about Lyndon Johnson is like going to an
elaborate buffet in order to get the four basic food groups; they both
give you what you need along with much, much more. In fact, we're only
at the appetizers, since Caro's third and latest volume, Master of
the Senate, comes in at over1,000 pages and still doesn't take the
story up through the 1960 election! Nonetheless, both are experiences to
be savored. Caro is a gifted and passionate writer, and his
all-encompassing approach to understanding LBJ provides readers with a
panoramic history of twentieth-century American politics as well as a
compelling discourse on the nature and uses of political power.

Moreover, in the midst of the plagiarism contretemps over Stephen
Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin, it is refreshing to read a popular
history that is original and well written. There is clearly no "Caro
Inc." with an army of researchers cutting and pasting books together as
fast as the printing presses can take them. Aided only by his wife, Ina,
Caro's project is now in its third decade. This slow pace results from a
methodical and exhaustive research process. One might well disagree with
Caro's analysis and interpretations, but no one can accuse him of
overlooking an important piece of evidence.

In reality, Master of the Senate is not one book but several.
Caro sets the stage with a history of the United States Senate. The
Senate is virtually unique among legislative bodies in any modern
democracy. With its six-year terms, equal representation for each state
regardless of population and its tradition of unlimited debate, the
Senate is an institution designed for inaction. Individual senators have
little or no incentive to yoke themselves together to advance the
national interest. By the time Johnson entered the Senate in 1949, the
body was increasingly seen as too inefficient to meet the demands of
modern government. Since the turn of the century, the President had
increasingly usurped its power in foreign policy, and many observers
predicted that the Senate would eventually have to go the way of most
legislative upper chambers and become, in effect, an American House of
Lords.

That the Senate did not wither away and the reasons for this fact form
the basis for another of Caro's books within a book, Lyndon Johnson's
ascent to "Master of the Senate." Possessed of ambition that can only be
described as obsessive, Johnson campaigned to increase his own power and
influence with a relentlessness and ruthlessness that would have made
Machiavelli blush.

Before Johnson could amass power in the Senate, however, he first had to
shore up his political base in Texas. Having only narrowly "won" (stolen
is the more appropriate word, as Caro vividly and convincingly
demonstrated in his previous volume) election to the Senate in 1948,
Johnson now had to prove his fealty to the Lone Star State's reactionary
and powerful oil and gas titans. To do so, Johnson organized a
behind-the-scenes campaign to block President Truman's reappointment of
Leland Olds as chairman of the Federal Power Commission. A staunch New
Dealer and a committed public servant, Olds had used his position at the
FPC to make sure that electric and natural gas companies did not gouge
their customers. As a result, he was anathema to the Texas natural gas
companies, who saw even the smallest and most reasonable limitation of
their already vast profits as socialist tyranny.

In earlier days, Johnson had fought the same fight as Olds, working as a
freshman Congressman to provide cheap electricity to rural farmers.
Doing so had secured Johnson a place in the hearts of his poor Texas
Hill Country constituents, but that counted for little against the
political power of the state's oil and gas industry. Ambition now
required Johnson to destroy Leland Olds. Unable to attack him on the
substance of his work at the FPC, Johnson instead distorted Olds's
writings as a journalist in the 1920s to portray him as a Communist.
Using a phrase that Joe McCarthy would have appreciated, Johnson
denounced Olds on the floor of the Senate, asking, "Shall we have a
commissioner or a commissar?" The choice of the Senate was clear; the
Olds reappointment failed by a vote of 53 to 15.

The Olds fight secured Johnson's political base and brought him into the
warm embrace of the Texas establishment. After his victory over Olds,
Johnson flew back to Texas on the private plane of Brown & Root, the
giant Texas construction company. "When the Brown & Root plane
delivered him to Texas, it delivered him first to Houston, where a Brown
& Root limousine met him and took him to the Brown & Root suite
in the Lamar Hotel. Waiting for him there, in Suite 8-F, were men who
really mattered in Texas: Herman and George Brown, of course, and oilman
Jim Abercrombie and insurance magnate Gus Wortham. And during the two
months he spent in Texas thereafter, the Senator spent time at Brown
& Root's hunting camp at Falfurrias, and in oilman Sid Richardson's
suite in the Fort Worth Club."

Caro shows how, having won over the men who really mattered in Texas,
Johnson set out to win over the men who really mattered in the Senate,
the "Old Bulls." As a result of the Solid South and the seniority rule,
nearly all of these men were the Southern barons who controlled the
powerful Senate committees. In many ways, currying favor with the Texas
establishment had been relatively easy; all it had required was
destroying the naïve and principled Leland Olds. But the Old Bulls,
men like Harry Byrd Sr. of Virginia, Walter George of Georgia and
Kenneth McKellar of Tennessee, were a much tougher crowd, not easily
deceived and viciously protective of their power and prerogatives.
Traditionally, one did not attain power by winning over such men;
rather, power came by becoming one of them. But this required the time
and patience necessary to accumulate enough seniority to land a choice
committee assignment and then more time and patience to ascend to the
chairmanship.

But, as Caro points out, Johnson had a very short supply of time and
patience. Indeed, he had risked everything to run for the Senate in 1948
in order to avoid the seniority trap of the House. Now he found himself
in the same bind. Even before he was sworn in, Johnson tried to persuade
the venerable Carl Hayden, chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, which
was in charge of office space, to give him an extra room. When Johnson
pressed his case too zealously, the usually courteous Hayden shut him
down, saying, "The trouble with you, Senator, is that you don't have the
seniority of a jackrabbit."

If Johnson didn't have the seniority to become one of the Old Bulls, he
would surely do everything he could to gain their favor. The usual
method was obsequiousness, telling these men how powerful and important
they were, and how much he had learned from them. According to Caro,
Johnson's behavior "proved the adage that no excess was possible."

One device, also favored by a more recent Texas politician, was to
bestow nicknames. Edwin "Big Ed" Johnson of Colorado was dubbed "Mr.
Wisdom," while Leverett Saltonstall of Massachusetts became "Old Oil on
Troubled Waters." Johnson resented having to use such tactics, telling
aide John Connally after fawning over a senior senator, "Christ, I've
been kissing asses all my life"; but ass-kissing worked. As Caro writes,
"In December, Hayden had refused to give Johnson that extra room in the
basement that he had asked for; in February Hayden found that an extra
room was, indeed, available."

While Hayden had the power to provide extra office space, real power in
the Senate rested with the acknowledged leader of the Old Bulls, Richard
Russell of Georgia. Just as Johnson in his earlier career had gained
power by making himself a protégé of House Speaker Sam
Rayburn and President Franklin Roosevelt, he now set out to cultivate
Russell. Though different in temperament and politics, all three men
shared a common element that Johnson used to ingratiate himself: As Caro
points out, all three men were lonely. Both Rayburn and Russell were
childless bachelors, while Roosevelt was largely estranged from his
children and wife. This provided the perfect opportunity for Johnson to
be the dutiful son and companion.

Mere companionship and filial piety, however, were not enough to win
over Russell. According to Caro, "It wasn't a son that Richard Russell
wanted, it was a soldier--a soldier for the Cause." And that cause was
white supremacy. In describing Russell's views on this issue, Caro shows
that while they were almost always cast as a reasoned, nonracist defense
of states' rights, racism was at their core, and such moderation was
merely tactical. "His charm," writes Caro, "was more effective than
chains in keeping blacks shackled to their terrible past." Caro's
description of Russell is not just of historical interest. With calls
for states' rights gaining renewed popularity and legitimacy, it is
important to remember that while not every states' rights advocate is a
closet racist, nearly every advocate of racial inequality has used
states' rights to cloak his real aims and beliefs.

Johnson was willing to take up arms for Russell's cause. In his maiden
speech in the Senate, Johnson denounced President Truman's call for
civil rights legislation in the same reasoned tones used by Russell.
When Johnson finished, Russell was the first to shake his hand, telling
him that his speech was "one of the ablest I have ever heard on the
subject."

Having gained Russell's and the Old Bulls' trust, Johnson now began to
build his own power. In 1950, after the outbreak of the Korean War, he
convinced Russell to allow him to chair a special committee on
preparedness. Caro's description of Johnson's committee is a textbook
example of the Washington version of stone soup, in which, with the
right skills and connections, one can turn nothing into something. For
the most part, the committee did very little original research or
investigation, instead recycling work done by other committees and
agencies. The difference, however, was that Johnson had a gift for
working the media. In this pretelevision era, the term "soundbite" had
yet to be coined, but Johnson was a master of it nonetheless. The
committee's first report was really an earlier, prewar report on the
nation's rubber supply. In the hands of Johnson and his staffer Horace
Busby, the report became a major story. "Phrases like 'darkest days,'
'business as usual,' 'too little and too late' leapt out of the final
report," writes Caro. Newspapers were particularly enamored of Johnson's
description of Defense Department desuetude as "siesta psychology."

Despite, or perhaps because of, the lack of substance, the preparedness
committee gave Johnson his first national attention. But the favor of
the Old Bulls and a handful of headlines were not nearly enough to
secure Johnson's ultimate prize, the presidency. Recognizing that the
traditional path to power in the Senate, and ultimately to the White
House, was still largely closed to a junior senator, Johnson decided to
create his own path. Here was where Johnson's cunning as a political
entrepreneur came into play. As Caro writes:

Lyndon Johnson's political genius was creative not merely in the lower,
technical aspects of politics but on much higher levels. And if there
was a single aspect of his creativity that had been, throughout his
career, most impressive, it was his capacity to look at an institution
that possessed only limited political power--an institution that no one
else thought of having the potential for any more than limited political
power--and to see in that institution the potential for such substantial
political power; to transform that institution so that it possessed such
power, and in the process of transforming it, to reap from that
transformation substantial personal power for himself.

The institution that Johnson chose was the party leadership of the
Senate. Almost utterly lacking in formal power, party leadership was
more often the graveyard of political careers than the launching pad. No
Senate Democratic leader had possessed any influence to speak of since
Joseph Robinson in the 1930s. The Democratic leaders immediately
preceding Johnson, Scott Lucas of Illinois and Ernest McFarland of
Arizona, had been disasters, utterly incapable of bridging the
differences between the party's liberal Northern and conservative
Southern wings. In fact, the demands of the job had contributed to the
election defeats of both men, Lucas in 1950 and McFarland in 1952. Now,
following the Republican sweep of 1952, the position of minority leader
stood open. Since no else wanted the position, Johnson, with Russell's
blessing, ascended to the post. Only four years into his first term,
Lyndon Johnson was now at least the nominal leader of the Senate
Democrats.

And Johnson soon converted nominal leadership in their power, explaining
that they needed to put their best people forward to defend against the
Republicans. But that would require handing out committee positions on
the basis of ability, not seniority. Using a combination of persuasion
and horse-trading, Johnson managed to make enough room to place every
Democrat on at least one major committee. In doing so, he transformed
the Senate, imbuing its committees, at least on the Democratic side,
with fresh blood. More important for Johnson, his own power had been
enhanced greatly. Dozens of members, liberals and conservatives,
Northerners and Southerners, now owed their committee assignments to
him, and that meant power.

Revamping the seniority system was but the first way Johnson became
master of the Senate. While much has been written about the famous
Johnson "treatment," LBJ's in-your-face style of persuasion, Caro
demonstrates that these skills, effective though they were, were not the
only ones at his disposal. Deploying a skilled staff, he soon knew more
about what was happening in the Senate than any other member, making him
the "go-to guy" for information. He managed to negotiate unanimous
consent agreements to limit debate, so that minor bills of importance to
individual senators could be passed with dispatch. Johnson was also a
skilled parliamentarian, using his knowledge of Senate rules and
procedures to outwit the majority Republicans. Finally, Johnson had an
astute grasp of national politics, demonstrated most effectively in the
battle over the Bricker Amendment. Advanced by Republican isolationists,
the constitutional amendment would have severely restricted presidential
power in foreign policy by requiring treaties to be approved by the
state legislatures as well as the Senate. Johnson not only managed to
defeat the amendment but to do so in a way that aligned the Democrats
with the popular Eisenhower against Congressional Republicans.

No method was beneath Johnson. He was just as willing to destroy the
careers of his Senate colleagues as he had been with Leland Olds.
Perhaps more than any other senator, Kentucky's Earle Clements had been
loyal to Johnson, "dog loyal," in Caro's words. But after a bill
supported by Johnson failed to pass on a tie vote, Johnson forced
Clements to switch his vote, although he knew it would destroy
Clements's re-election hopes. In the case of Virgil Chapman, also of
Kentucky, Johnson helped to destroy not only his career but his life.
Even though Johnson knew Chapman was falling further and further into
the depths of alcoholism, his response was not compassion but
manipulation. He would bring Chapman to his office after the Senate
recessed and ply him with drinks until the inebriated Kentuckian would
agree to anything Johnson wanted. Chapman eventually died in a drunk
driving accident.

Johnson's success as minority leader helped the Democrats regain control
of the Senate after the 1954 elections. Now the majority leader, Johnson
further extended his power. As a consequence, the Senate began to act
with new efficiency and effectiveness. And even though Johnson never
strayed too far from Russell and the other conservative senators upon
whom he relied, he still managed to help Democratic liberals to achieve
at least some of their legislative goals. By the mid-1950s, the changes
wrought by Johnson had dispelled much of the criticism leveled against
the Senate.

Caro, however, suggests that Johnson might have destroyed the Senate in
order to save it, since these changes came at the cost of diminishing
deliberations, where individual senators could educate and inform the
public on the great issues of the day. He quotes Paul Douglas, liberal
Democratic senator from Illinois during the 1950s and oftentimes a foe
of Johnson, who charged, "Under Johnson, the Senate functions like a
Greek tragedy. All the action takes place offstage, before the play
begins. Nothing is left to open and spontaneous debate, nothing is left
to the participants but the enactment of their prescribed roles." Caro
goes further, suggesting that by limiting debate, Johnson was making the
Senate an expression of his own mania for control and aversion to debate
and dissent.

Regardless of Johnson's real motivations for limiting debate, this is an
overly romantic view of Senate proceedings, in which debate consists
more of partisan bickering and mundane bloviating than reasoned and
informed discourse. Furthermore, unlimited debate is tailor-made for
defenders of the status quo, allowing them great power to block any
measure to which they object. Caro even seems to acknowledge this in a
footnote, where he quotes Johnson aide Harry McPherson, "Complaints
about limiting debates...often turned out to be based on a plaintiff's
annoyance that he must either miss a vote or forgo a speaking engagement
back home. And besides, who knew better than liberals the enervating
consequences of unlimited debate."

Caro may be right that Johnson saved the Senate, but he doesn't consider
whether it was worth saving in the first place. Yes, Johnson did reform
the chamber so that it could legislate more effectively, but the
institution remained and remains a throwback to a predemocratic era. Not
only does the Senate's equal representation of states grossly distort
the one-person, one-vote principle, but the ability to filibuster means
that forty-one senators, even if they represent the twenty-one smallest
states (with only 11 percent of the total population), can veto any
piece of legislation. And since Republicans predominate in small states,
the institution serves only to magnify their power. For example, even
though Democrats have a 50-49 edge in the current Senate (the
remaining member is Independent Jim Jeffords of Vermont), sixty senators
represent states won by George W. Bush in the 2000 election. By saving
the Senate, one might argue, Johnson only succeeded in maintaining an
institution that has traditionally served to reinforce conservatives and
the status quo.

In 1956, Johnson thought the time was right to make his move for the
Democratic nomination. But this effort was doomed before it even began.
First, he refused to be an active candidate, thus much of the support
from the South and West that might have been his if he wanted it went to
other candidates. Even if Johnson had run a more active and skillful
campaign, it was clear that he never had enough liberal support to win
the nomination. For all that he had accomplished in the Senate, Johnson
was still viewed as suspect by Democratic liberals. In some ways, as
Caro suggests, the liberals' criticism was unfair. Johnson was no Hubert
Humphrey, to be sure, but he was also no Richard Russell or James
Eastland. During his twelve years in the Senate, Johnson's Americans for
Democratic Action liberal-voting score was fifty-six, just about average
for the party and essentially splitting the difference between the
Southern Democratic average of thirty-seven and the Northern Democratic
average of seventy-five. Moreover, during his tenure as majority leader
from 1955 to 1960, Johnson's average score was sixty-five.

But Johnson recognized that his overall ADA score was not the real
issue. By the mid-1950s, Democratic liberals increasingly used civil
rights as a litmus test for support. According to Caro, Johnson would
tell friends privately, "I want to run the Senate. I want to pass the
bills that need to be passed. I want my party to do right. But all I
ever hear from the liberals is Nigra, Nigra, Nigra." (During the 1964
campaign, Johnson would use the same refrain in a very different
context, telling a New Orleans audience of a dying Southern senator who
wanted to give one more speech, a good Democratic speech, because the
only speeches the people of his state ever heard were "Nigra, Nigra,
Nigra.") Caro goes on to add that the conclusion for Johnson was clear:

He knew now that the only way to realize his great ambition was to
fight--really fight, fight aggressively and effectively--for civil
rights; in fact, it was probably necessary for him not only to fight but
to fight and win: given their conviction that he controlled the Senate,
the only way the liberals would be satisfied of his good intentions
would be if that body passed a civil rights bill. But therein lay a
seemingly insoluble dilemma: that way--the only way--did not seem a
possible way. Because while he couldn't win his party's presidential
nomination with only southern support, he couldn't win it with only
northern support either. Scrubbing off the southern taint thoroughly
enough within the next four years to become so overwhelmingly a liberal
favorite that he could win the nomination with northern votes alone was
obviously out of the question, so dispensing with southern support was
not feasible: he had to keep the states of the Old Confederacy on his
side. And yet a public official who fought for civil rights invariably
lost those states.

This dilemma sets up another book within a book and the dramatic climax
of Master of the Senate, the battle over the 1957 Civil Rights
Act. This is where Caro's gifts as a storyteller really come alive, and
his account provides what is surely one of the best analyses of the
legislative process ever written. Moreover, Caro is right to label
Johnson's role in the passage of this legislation as an exercise of
"genius." But Caro goes too far in suggesting that the 1957 Civil Rights
Act marked a turning point at which Johnson's "compassion, and the
ability to make compassion meaningful, would shine forth at last."

Caro does recognize that the practical impact of the 1957 legislation
was inconsequential and far less significant than the later Civil Rights
Act of 1964 or the Voting Rights Act of 1965. And while the bill's
proponents described it as half a loaf, Caro agrees with Humphrey, who
described it as a "crumb." Nonetheless, Caro claims that as the first
civil rights measure to pass the Senate and to be enacted into law since
1875, the legislation was of immense symbolic importance and the
harbinger of things to come. "The Civil Rights Act of 1957," according
to Caro, "was hope." Caro has a point, but a debatable one. The law did
raise hopes, but by accomplishing so little, many of those hopes ended
up dashed. Furthermore, while the 1957 act was a first step toward more
effective legislation, it would take another eight years to complete the
journey, eight more years of Jim Crow and disfranchisement, of
oppression and violence. Hope was better than nothing, but help is what
was really needed.

And help would have been provided then, if not for Lyndon Johnson. Help
was contained in the civil rights bill proposed by the Eisenhower
Administration and passed by the House, with strong provisions against
discrimination in public accommodations and voting, along with effective
enforcement mechanisms. But Johnson knew that such a bill was utterly
unacceptable to his Southern colleagues. Thus, while Johnson recognized
that he had to fight for a civil rights bill, it couldn't bethis civil rights bill.

Consequently, Johnson's first maneuver was to help defeat an effort by
Republicans and liberal Democrats to rewrite Senate Rule 22 in order to
short-circuit the expected Southern filibuster. At the opening of the
1957 session, pro-civil rights senators sought a ruling from Vice
President Richard Nixon, acting in his capacity as the Senate's
presiding officer, that the Senate was not a continuing body and
therefore was not bound by previous rules. That would mean that a
majority of senators could establish a new rule allowing debate to be
shut off with only a simple majority, not the usual and nearly
unobtainable sixty-four votes. Indeed, Nixon, hoping to swing black
votes to the GOP, would have issued such a decision. But before he could
do so, Johnson used his prerogative as majority leader to move to table
the proposed rules change. Using all the skill and power he had amassed
as majority leader, Johnson managed to get a majority for his motion.
But it was a 55-38 tally. If only seven votes had gone the other
way (the three absentees having announced against Johnson's motion), the
motion would have lost, Nixon would have issued his decision, the
filibuster would have been broken and an effective civil rights bill
would have been passed in 1957, not 1964. As a result of the defeat on
Rule 22, the bill that ultimately did pass was only a very weak voting
rights measure.

If ever one needs evidence of the contingency of history, imagine, if
you will, those seven votes going the other way. Jim Crow would have
died in the late 1950s, avoiding much of the tumult of the 1960s. The
Republicans, led by Richard Nixon, would have been the party of civil
rights, not the Democrats and Lyndon Johnson. From there, one can spin
off any number of plausible scenarios that result in a very different
history of the past forty years.

But none of these scenarios were acceptable to the Lyndon Johnson of
1957, since they would have conflicted with his ambition; and at that
point, despite Caro's claim, his ambition was still more important than
his compassion. Switching sides on Rule 22 would have destroyed his
Southern support and with it any chance he had of becoming President.
Johnson's compassion would eventually shine through, and as a result,
civil rights would eventually come to black America. But they would not
come until Lyndon Johnson's ambition would allow them to come.

Pat Buchanan surely holds the record for the greatest impact on a presidential election with the fewest votes. With less than 0.43 percent of the tally nationally, he still managed to decide the 2000 election. But for the thousands of votes mistakenly cast for Buchanan in Palm Beach because of the infamously confusing "butterfly" ballot, Al Gore would be President today and George W. Bush would be the Republican Michael Dukakis.

Buchanan's pernicious influence, however, did not end with the 2000 election. He's now picking up where he left off with his infamous "cultural war" speech to the 1992 Republican convention, a speech, as Molly Ivins quipped, that "sounded better in the original German." Well, Buchanan's been translating from Deutsch again, this time with The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Immigrant Invasions Imperil Our Country and Civilization, his new book. The Death of the West harks back to the xenophobic jeremiads of the early twentieth century, such as Madison Grant's The Passing of the Great Race, Lothrop Stoddard's The Rising Tide of Color, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century and Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West.

Indeed, enterprising journalists and historians looking to expose the next Stephen Ambrose or Doris Kearns Goodwin should consider comparing Buchanan's book side by side with these others. In addition to revising Spengler's title, Buchanan shares Stoddard's love of watery metaphors--both books gush with rising tides, surging oceans and flooding rivers of nonwhites, all of which push inexorably against the ever more precarious dams and dikes around the white world. The two authors also share a predilection for quoting Rudyard Kipling, the poet laureate of the "white man's burden."

Each of these earlier books shares the same simple theme: It's Us against Them, and with fewer and fewer of Us and more and more of Them, things look grim for Us. Buchanan readily accepts the "demography is destiny" argument: "As a growing population has long been a mark of healthy nations and rising civilizations, falling populations have been a sign of nations and civilizations in decline." Buchanan's data clearly put the West into the latter category. "In 1960, people of European ancestry were one-fourth of the world's population; in 2000, they were one-sixth, in 2050, they will be one-tenth. These are the statistics of a vanishing race."

And who's responsible for this disappearance? For Buchanan, women bear most of the blame. Liberated by technological and cultural changes, he argues, Western women have abandoned their true calling as designated racial breeders. "Only the mass reconversion of Western women to an idea that they seem to have given up--that the good life lies in bearing and raising children and sending them out into the world to continue the family and nation--can prevent the Death of the West."

Faced with declining birthrates, the only alternative available to Western nations if they wish to maintain themselves is massive immigration from the burgeoning populations of Asia, Africa and the Middle East. But for Buchanan, this medicine is worse than the disease, since immigration on this scale entails the introduction of too many nonwhite non-Christians. Regarding Europe, he writes: "And as the millions pour into Europe from North Africa and the Middle East, they will bring their Arab and Islamic culture, traditions, loyalties, and faith, and create replicas of their homelands in the heartland of the West. Will they assimilate, or will they endure as indigestible parts of Africa and Arabia in the base camp of what was once Christendom?" Clearly he thinks the latter. The United States faces a similar danger, he warns: "Uncontrolled immigration threatens to deconstruct the nation we grew up in and convert America into a conglomeration of peoples with almost nothing in common--not history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors. Balkanization beckons."

Buchanan must know that many have rung this tocsin before him, and each time it has been a false alarm. The West's population has probably declined relative to the rest of the world ever since the Western world defined itself as such. For example, when Stoddard wrote in 1922, he sounded the alarm because Western nations had declined to only one-third of the world's population. By 1960, as Buchanan points out, the Western share of the world's population had fallen to one-fourth. Despite this relative decline in population, he considers 1960 as the height of Western power and influence. Furthermore, most evidence suggests that Western nations are at least as powerful now as in 1960, even with the decline in population.

Buchanan's warnings about the United States ring just as hollow. Of the 30 million foreign-born residents, he claims, "Even the Great Wave of immigration from 1890 to 1920 was nothing like this." He's right--that wave surpassed the current one. Today, foreign-born residents make up about 11 percent of the US population, but from the 1870s to the 1920s, that number fluctuated between 13 percent and 15 percent.

Buchanan, however, also argues that today's immigrants are fundamentally different from earlier generations of newcomers; but again, there's no evidence for this. America was hardly more familiar to a Southern Italian peasant who came to New York City in 1900 than it is to an immigrant today from Nigeria or the Philippines. If anything, the spread of global markets and American popular culture has made recent immigrants more attuned to the ways of their new home than their predecessors of a century ago. Furthermore, the bulk of contemporary immigrants come from Latin America, and thus possess the Christian faith that Buchanan views as central to any definition of America. Indeed, the vast majority of Latin American immigrants share Buchanan's Catholicism. Nonetheless, these immigrants "not only come from another culture, but millions are of another race," making it difficult if not impossible for them to assimilate into US society. While Buchanan might consider Latinos as his brothers in Christ, he draws the line at having them as neighbors or fellow citizens.

September 11, Buchanan argues, painfully exposed the threat from contemporary immigrants: "Suddenly, we awoke to the realization that among our millions of foreign-born, a third are here illegally, tens of thousands are loyal to regimes with which we could be at war, and some are trained terrorists sent here to murder Americans." But the past is full of similar warnings about the enemy within. During World War II, anti-Japanese prejudices combined with national security concerns to result in the internment of thousands of US citizens. During World War I, "unhyphenated" Americans saw German-Americans as the Kaiser's minions, engaging in sedition and sabotage to aid the cause of the Fatherland. Yet as these instances demonstrate, the real threat, then as now, existed largely in fevered nativist minds.

This selective and myopic view of American nativism runs throughout The Death of the West. On the one hand, Buchanan refers to nativist statements by such people as Benjamin Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge to support his assertion that concerns over immigration are not un-American. On the other hand, while he is correct that nativism has always been one of America's multiple political traditions, Buchanan has nary a mention of how pervasive, inaccurate and pernicious such sentiments have been. Of the Know-Nothings, he knows nothing. He quotes Al Smith, the first Catholic nominated for the presidency by a major party, but includes no mention that anti-Catholic prejudices made a major contribution to his landslide defeat in the 1928 election, as he was vigorously opposed by Protestant leaders and groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. (After the election, the joke went, Smith sent a one-word telegram to the Pope: "Unpack.") To Buchanan, it seems, anti-Catholic sentiment is a recent development and limited to left-wing intellectuals. Overall, he chooses to ignore the fact that nearly every immigrant to this country confronted nativists who argued that their race, religion, ethnicity or culture made them unfit to become full American citizens. Furthermore, if these previous nativists had had their way, they would have excluded the ancestors of most current American citizens, including Buchanan's.

Buchanan recognizes that he's in a minefield with this subject, and he makes some efforts to tread lightly. To rebut accusations that he's an anti-Semite, he sheds crocodile tears over the danger to Israel from a growing Arab population and occasionally (but not consistently) refers to America's Judeo-Christian values. But like Dr. Strangelove's hand, Buchanan's anti-Semitism refuses to stay under control. As examples of conservative leaders who have failed to fight the culture wars with sufficient zeal, he singles out Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Norman Podhoretz. One might well ask why these three when one could level similar charges against Jack Kemp, Bob Dole, John McCain and even George W. Bush.

By the end of the book Buchanan has dropped all pretenses, declaring America to be a Christian nation. His racism is equally apparent. For example, in addition to warning that many current immigrants are of a different--that is, nonwhite--race, he includes a lengthy discussion of black crime rates. Given that most blacks can trace their American ancestry back further than most white Americans, it's clear that Buchanan defines America not by "history, heroes, language, culture, faith, or ancestors" but by race.

If Buchanan's diagnosis of the problem is objectionable, his solution is even worse. For him, democracy, a shared culture and even a common race offer no defense against the West's impending doom. Rather, he argues, "If the West expects a long life, it had best recapture the fighting faith of its youth." And what were these youthful characteristics? "Protestant monarchs and Catholic kings alike did not flinch at burning heretics or drawing and quartering them at the Tyburn tree. The Christianity that conquered the world was not a milquetoast faith, and the custodians of that faith did not believe all religions were equal. One was true; all the rest were false." To believe otherwise invites disaster, "For it is in the nature of things that nations and religions rule or are ruled."

Buchanan's right-wing nativism is nothing new, so it might be tempting to dismiss him and his book as inconsequential. After all, didn't the 2000 election prove that Buchanan had only marginal electoral support and that even the Republican Party considers his views too extreme? But votes don't always measure influence, and The Death of the West has clearly struck a responsive chord. Not only does it stand near the top of the New York Times bestseller list, but its author remains a prominent fixture on the TV talk-show circuit. Indeed, it's interesting to contrast the reception of The Death of the West with that of Buchanan's previous book, A Republic, Not an Empire. The latter set off a firestorm of criticism, especially among Republicans and conservatives, when Buchanan argued that Hitler had not threatened the United States. If anything, The Death of the West is even worse, since Buchanan moves beyond minimizing the danger of Hitler to the open espousal of many of his doctrines. Yet this time around, the conservative commentators have not been nearly as critical. Then, of course, Buchanan was in the middle of bolting the GOP, potentially splitting the conservative vote and throwing the election to the Democrats. None of this came to pass, with Buchanan even helping Bush to win Florida. But the lesson seems clear: Conservatives are more than willing to tolerate Buchanan's racism and xenophobia, so long as he doesn't pose a direct threat to their political interests.

Even more disturbing than Buchanan's kid-gloves treatment by the media and the right is that the book's popularity stems from and seems likely to reinforce the upsurge in nativist sentiments after September 11. For many Americans, those tragic events gave even more reason to see the world in manichean terms and to divide Americans along lines of race, religion and ethnicity. Consequently, relatively open immigration policies came under attack. In Congress, a House caucus devoted to immigration restriction doubled in membership after September 11. Representative James Traficant, Democrat of Ohio, spoke for many of those members when he asked, "How do you defend your home if your front and back doors are unlocked? What do we stand for if we can't secure our borders? How many more Americans will die?... If 300,000 illegal immigrants can gain access to America every year, trying to find a better life, do not doubt for one moment that a larger contingent of people with evil intentions could gain entry into America and continue to kill American citizens."

Thankfully, such sentiments have not gained much headway in the ensuing months. Although the Bush Administration has backed off its proposal for granting amnesty to illegal immigrants from Mexico, it has shown few signs of embracing significant immigration restrictions in response to September 11 and has even agreed to restore food-stamp eligibility to legal immigrants. In Congress, immigration opponents have failed even to gain a formal hearing for their proposals. Yet the popularity of The Death of the West shows that nativist attitudes have not disappeared, and Buchanan's diatribe will undoubtedly help reinforce such views. Furthermore, both opponents and supporters of open immigration recognize that another incident of terrorism is perhaps all that is needed to turn The Death of the West from polemic to policy.